In understanding what I am trying to say you will have to
discard the notion that it is something you have known all the
time, which just happened to get well formulated by me. We are
really up against one of the most difficult of human performances
-- organizing thought about oneself and others, not on the basis
of the unique individual me that is perhaps one's most
valuable possession, but on the basis of one's common humanity.
(Sullivan, 1953, p. 4)

All of us are afflicted by the fact that
long before we can make brilliant intellectual formulations, we
catch on to a good deal which is presented to us, first by the
mothering one and then by other people who have to do with keeping
us alive through the period of our utter dependence. Before anyone
can remember, except under the most extraordinary circumstances,
there appears in every human being a capacity to undergo a vary
unpleasant experience. This experience is utilized by all
cultures, by some a little and by some a great deal, in training
the human animal to become a person, more or less according to the
prescriptions of the particular culture. The unpleasant experience
to which I am referring I call anxiety. (Sullivan, 1953, p. 8)

The tension of anxiety, when present in the mothering one,
induces anxiety in the infant. (ibid., p. 41)

"All experience occurs in one or more of three
'modes'-the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic. As the Greek roots
of this horrendous term indicate, the prototaxic
moderefers to the first kind of experience the infant has
and the order or arrangement in which it occurs. . . . According to
Sullivan's hypothesis all that the infant "knows" are momentary
states, the distinction of before and after being a later
acquirement. The infant vaguely feels or 'prehends' earlier and later
states without realizing any serial connection between them. . . .He
has no awareness of himself as an entity separate from the rest of
the world. In other words, his felt experience is all of a piece,
undifferentiated, without definite limits. It is as if his
experiences were 'cosmic'. . . .

Parataxic

"As the infant develops and maturation proceeds, the
original undifferentiated wholeness of experience is broken. However,
the 'parts,' the diverse aspects, the various kinds of experience are
not related or connected in a logical fashion. They 'just happen'
together, or they do not, depending on circumstances. In other words,
various experiences are felt as concomitant, not recognized as
connected in an orderly way. The child cannot yet relate them to one
another or make logical distinctions among them. What is experienced
is assumed to be the 'natural' way of such occurrences, without
reflection and comparison. Since no connections or relations are
established, there is no logical movement of 'thought' from one idea
to the next. The parataxic mode is not a step by step
process. Experience is undergone as momentary, unconnected states of
being.

Syntaxic

". . . The child gradually learns the 'consensually
validated' meaning of language - in the widest sense of language.
These meanings have been acquired from group activities,
interpersonal activities, social experience. Consensually validated
symbol activity involves an appeal to principles which are accepted
as true by the hearer. And when this happens, the youngster has
acquired or learned the syntaxic mode of experience."
(Mullahy, 1948, pp. 286-291)

Heuristic Stages in Development

Infancy

extends from a few minutes after birth to the
appearance of articulate speech, however uncommunicative or
meaningless.

Childhood

extends from the ability to utter articulate sounds of
or pertaining to speech, to the appearance of the need for playmates
-- that is, companions. cooperative beings of approximately one's own
status in all sorts of respects. This ushers in the

Juvenile Era

which extends through most of the grammar-school years
to the eruption, due to maturation, of a need for an intimate
relation with another person of comparable status. This, in turn,
ushers in the era that we call

Preadolescence

an exceedingly important but chronologically rather
brief period that ordinarily ends with the eruption of genital
sexuality and puberty, but psychologically or psychiatrically ends
with the movement of strong interest from a person of one's own sex
to a person of the other sex. These phenomena mark the beginning of

Adolescence

which in this culture (it varies, however, from
culture to culture) continues until one has patterned some type of
performance which satisfies one's lust, one's genital drives. Such
patterning ushers in

Late Adolescence

which in turn continues as an era of personality until
any partially developed aspects of personality fall into their proper
relationship to their time partition; and one is able, at

Adulthood

to establish relationships of love for some other
person, in which relationship the other person is as significant, or
nearly as significant, as one's self. This really highly developed
intimacy with another person is not the principal business of life,
but is, perhaps, the principal source of satisfaction in life; and
one goes on developing in depth of interest or in scope of interest,
or in both depth and scope, from that time until unhappy
retrogressive changes in the organism lead to old age (Sullivan,
1953, pp. 34).

Beginnings of the Self-System

Successful training of the functional activity of the
anal zone of interaction accentuates a new aspect of tenderness --
namely, the additive role of tenderness as a sequel to what the
mothering one regards as good behavior. Now this is, in effect --
however it may be prehended by the infant -- a reward, which,
once the approved social ritual connected with defecating has worked
out well, is added to the satisfaction of the anal zone. Here is
tenderness taking on the attribute of a reward for having learned
something, or for behaving right.

Thus the mother, or the parent responsible for acculturation or
socialization, now adds tenderness to her increasingly neutral
behavior in a way that can be called rewarding. I think that very,
very often the parent does this with no thought of rewarding the
infant. Very often the rewarding tenderness merely arises from the
pleasure of the mothering one in the skill which the infant has
learned ... (Sullivan, 1953, p. 158).

Heterosexual Intimacy and Lust

Sullivan notes a problem of timing:

[W]omen undergo the puberty change somewhat in advance
of men [and this] leads to a sort of stutter in developmental
progress between the boys and the girls in an age community [like the
school] so that by the time most of the boys have gotten really
around to an interest in girls, most of the girls are already fairly
wound up in their problems about boys. (Sullivan, 1953, p. 166)

In Chapter 17 (Early Adolescence) Sullivan begins a several-page
discussion of "collisions between the intimacy need and lust."

A much more common evidence of the collision of these
two powerful motivational systems is seen among adolescents in this
culture as the segregation of object persons, which is in itself an
extremely unfortunate way of growing up. By this I refer to the
creating of distinctions between people toward whom lustful
motivations can apply, and people who will be sought for the relief
of loneliness -- that is, for collaborative intimacy, for friendship.
The classical instance is the old one of the prostitute and the good
girl. ... Nowadays, the far more prevalent distinction is between
sexy girls and good girls, rather than this gross division into bad
women and good women. But no matter how it comes about that the
other sex is cut up into two groups -- one of which can satisfy a
person's loneliness and spare him anxiety, while the other satisfies
his lust -- the trouble with this is that lust is a part of
personality, and no one can get very far at completing his
personality in this way. Thus satisfying one's lust must be at
considerable cost to one's self-esteem, since the bad girls are
unworthy and not really people in the way that good girls are. So
wherever you find a person who makes this sharp separation of members
of the other sex into those who are, you might say, lustful and those
who are nonlustful, you may assume that this person has quite a
cleavage with respect to his genital behavior, so that he is not
really capable of integrating it into his life, simply and with
self-respect.

These sundry collisions that come along at this stage may be the
principle motive for preadolescents or very early adolescents getting
into "homosexual" play, with some remarkable variations. But a much
more common outcome of these various collisions -- these difficulties
in developing activity to suit one's needs -- is the breaking out of
a great deal of autosexual behavior, in which one satisfies one's own
lust as best one can; this behavior appears because of the various
inhibitions which have been inculcated on the subject of freedom
regarding the genitals. Now this activity, commonly called
masturbation, has in general been rather severely condemned in every
culture that generally imposes marked restrictions on freedom of
sexual development. That's very neat, you see; it means that
adolescence is going to be hell whatever you do, unless you have
wonderful preparation for being different from everyone else -- in
which case you may get into trouble for being different. (Sullivan,
1953, pp. 269-270)

Sullivan's Biography

Sullivan's longtime student and colleague, Helen Swick Perry,
devoted many years to bringing his recorded and transcribed lectures
to print as books. Her marvelous biography of Sullivan provides
essential background for core aspects of his theorizing, as in the
case of his mother's hospitalization for depression (Chapter 5: "The
Disappearance of Harry's Mother") when he was small.

One can imagine the family explanation given to Harry
when he was older: Your mother was very ill when you were two and
a half, she wasn't well at all, so you went to live with your
grandmother, and she took care of you. She used to put a spider at
the top of the stairway going down to the cellar, and you were so
deathly afraid of spiders you wouldn't go near the steps (Perry,
1982, p. 38).

Sullivan's own mysterious "schizophrenic" episode during college
is recounted in Chapter 19, "The Disappearance of Harry," and Perry
links this late adolescent exprience with Sullivan's remarkable gift
for understanding schizophrenic
psychosis in later life.